'The Drab Suburban Streets were Metamorphosed into a Veritable Fairyland': Spectacle and Festivity in The Ilford Hospital Carnival, 1905-1914.

Ilford's rapid population growth during the 1890s and 1900s fuelled demand for the establishment of a local emergency hospital and, in order to finance this development, residents held an annual carnival every July from 1905 to 1914. The carnival was a huge success, eventually attracting estimated crowds of around 250,000 people. This article uses the Ilford Carnival to examine the relationship between leisure and suburbanization. It analyses the carnival as a spectacle, considering the event's combination of tradition and modernity, the role of commerce and technology in the production and reproduction of its imagery, and the geographies of cultural dissemination involved. The article then evaluates the carnival as a festival, examining how it both contributed to local identity formation and inverted suburban values, as well as how it helped bring meaning to suburban time and related to changes in the temporal organization of work and leisure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]